The key differences, and the pros and cons, between Bing and Google are a frequent topic of debate among digital marketers when it comes to SEM. Which platform has stronger reach, better revenue generation, and stronger returns? Which is cheaper on average? Which is better at targeting leads and driving traffic?
It’s easy to view the two search engines as rivals, but they actually work best hand-in-hand. As a business or digital marketer, you should be optimising your Pay-Per-Click advertisements for both, since each comes with its own features and benefits worth understanding upfront. With that in mind, here’s a closer look at the main differences between Bing and Google SEM.
Bing Ads vs. Google Ads
Bing Ads run across Microsoft’s three most popular search engines, Bing, Yahoo!, and AOL, so advertising on one platform makes your ad visible across all three. That substantially widens your paid campaign’s exposure, especially with over 5 billion monthly searches happening across the Microsoft network.
Google Ads works a little differently, built around two advertising networks. The Search Network lets marketers create text ads that show up on the search results page, while the Display Network lets them build display ads that appear across a vast range of websites online.
Both platforms share similar core functionality: you bid on keywords based on factors like traffic volume, your ad appears when someone searches that keyword, and you pay a fee whenever a visitor clicks through. As with Google, ad copy is capped at 80 characters, and both platforms offer support tools to help build a relevant keyword list.
Targeting, Filtering Options & Social Extensions
Bing lets you set up device targeting filters, a mobile traffic option, for example, to control where and when your ad gets published. Google’s mobile ad targeting isn’t quite as advanced or flexible by comparison. Bing also lets you choose to run your ad on just one platform, say Yahoo!, while filtering out Bing and AOL entirely, giving you more flexible marketing capabilities and the ability to target by device type and OS.
Advertisers can also assign different Bing campaigns to different time zones, a function AdWords doesn’t offer. That same flexibility shows up at the ad group level too: Google lets advertisers set network, location, language, ad scheduling, and rotation settings at the campaign level, but ad groups stay locked to those campaign-wide settings. Bing Ads, on the other hand, allows marketers to make more precise changes and targeting adjustments right down at the ad group level.
With Bing Ads, for instance, you can set up age filters so search ads only reach visitors within certain age groups, and location filters that restrict visibility to specific geographic audiences. That precision tends to translate into higher-quality leads and stronger conversion or engagement rates.
Bing also has a genuinely useful social extension, a line of ad copy that shows visitors your business’s follower count on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Google Ads, by contrast, only surfaces Google+ follower counts.
Audience Reach, Engagement & Conversion
Google currently dominates the search engine market, holding a 92.05% market share as of February 2021 and reaching more than 4 billion internet users worldwide. There’s no denying Google’s audience reach is larger, but Bing remains a genuinely underexplored opportunity, with over 137 million users and 6 billion monthly searches of its own.
Bing’s core demographic makes it a worthwhile investment for plenty of businesses too. Its users skew older than Google’s on average, nearly three-quarters are over 35, and a third of the network has a disposable income above $100K, while half report a household income at or above the 75th percentile. That kind of buying power tends to translate into higher sales, conversions, and click-through rates.
Bing is also less competitive than Google Ads, which makes it a strong fit for SME businesses, and it offers more conversion opportunities overall, since users shop online 36% more than users of any other search engine. Bing’s audience also leans more toward e-commerce, financial, and shopping interests, which tends to mean stronger post-click engagement. In one industry, Bing Ads recorded a 56% higher conversion rate than Google Ads, along with a 34% higher CTR.
Cost for SEM
With fewer competitors bidding on keywords, Bing Ads campaigns typically cost less to run, some businesses spend 20 to 35% less on Bing than they would on Google. On cost-per-click specifically, ReportGarden puts the average CPC at $7.99 for Bing versus $20.08 for Google, and in some cases Bing’s average CPC runs as much as 70% lower.
That said, it’s worth keeping in mind that Bing and Google draw genuinely different traffic. Bing’s lower traffic volume is part of why its CPC runs cheaper, and that lower cost can translate into a stronger ROI if you land the right keyword at the right time. In some cases, though, Bing’s traffic quality can be lower, which means advertisers end up paying more per conversion than they would on Google.
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